ArenaNet has called guilds in to question. Not all guilds. The very active, very big guilds are having no issues plowing right ahead to unlocking all the mission types at the pace of a few months (or less!). It’s the small guilds that are having problems. It’s the small guilds that feel threatened.

I could feel annoyed by this attack by another developer on friends & family gaming, on the casual playstyle more interested in playing with a specific group than chasing the large guilds with the most active players. But frankly I couldn’t care less. Just like I never expected to Raid back in my early WoW years, I have no expectation that I should be entitled to activities designed for larger groups in Guild Wars 2.

The game still has a ton of content I’ve not yet seen, classes I will want to slowly level to the cap; zones and puzzles to explore and enjoy. So long as the living story concept continues there’ll be something for smaller guilds to do and solo or duo players to participate in.

From my perspective guild missions have been added to keep the dedicated players playing and spending. It’s there perhaps because ArenaNet realises that Guild Wars 2 has already gone too far down the path of copying World of Warcraft’s PVE end-game of heroics and raids. The game wasn’t designed that way and is ill-adapted to compete on that model. Guild missions gives achievement-focused players and min-maxers something new to do; it also will keep the more ‘social raider’ type of player engaged as they play to do stuff with their guild in larger groups and this content seems to fit that bill.

If anything it’s the medium-sized guilds that may suffer from this in the longer term. They will eventually start loosing players to the big guilds as they’ll get a taste for this content but will not progress as well and will not always be able to field enough players to complete tasks. The friends & family guilds on the other hand, the guilds of close-knit friends from Guild Wars 1 or Everquest or where-ever who only play the game together; those guilds won’t be affected by this one jot.